From lupa at kos.net Sat Jan 3 21:34:01 2009 From: lupa at kos.net (Molly Wolf) Date: Sat, 03 Jan 2009 16:34:01 -0500 Subject: [SB] Sabbath Blessing Message-ID: <20090103213404.E6C6BB887E@barracuda.rutabaga.org> New Year The new year and I are staring at each other blankly, trying to make each other out. The old year ended with a major shift, in that I put an ancient misery out of its misery, which was a good thing and a sort of clearing of decks. But now the decks look empty. I'm in a good space, for the first time in a very long time, but I'm not quite sure what I'm supposed to be doing with myself. The theological answer, as always, is "God", but that's too abstract and too pat. Maybe others do God-stuff intellectually, but my best God-stuff is always relational, and relational is a bit of a blank space at the moment. Oh, I have my beloveds, my children and my friends, but if they filled my days to completion, that would mean that I was taking up too much space in theirs. I have my work, which I also love, but it's an intermittent business. Housekeeping never has cut it for me. So what am I supposed to do with myself? It occurs to me, far too slowly (as always) that maybe this might be an issue for prayer. Maybe I'm supposed to let God make some decisions about the directions I should be taking in this year. Mind you, that means actually *trusting* God, and my trust tends to be a sort-of thing. It's not that I don't trust God to make the right decisions; it's more trusting God to make them clear to me, because in the past, that hasn't always happened. What I really want is skywriting. Or, as a friend of mine put it, I want God to put it out there in English, neon, and bright pink. I want a voice thundering from Heaven telling me exactly what I should be doing, and how I should be doing it. But submission means not only submitting my quite formidable will; it means submitting all the other stuff: my need for clarity, for example. It means handing over the past fully and completely and believing that the present is where a person should dwell, letting God look after what's yet to come. That's a considerable stretch for a strong-minded woman. Would I jump if God yelled "Jump"? Quite likely, as I am an obliging person. But how would I know it was God yelling "Jump!" and not some other supernatural being? I have had enough experience with the Other Side to know that it can put on a pretty convincing God-act -- hence that business about "the wisdom to know the difference". Some of the holiest, healthiest people I've ever encountered were not Christians, and some of the sickest chickens I've ever encountered were. Is problem. Another layer of trust: that the people sent into my life are the people who are supposed to be there, for the time being, for whatever reason. Oh, boy, God, this is asking an awful lot.... I have to remember that what often stands between me and the face of my Maker is pain -- the pain of sin received and the pain of sin committed -- but also that sin has already been defeated, hard as that is to believe sometimes. The essential thing is to "let go and let God" for the whole shebang. I will give that another try. Meanwhile, the new year waits. I think it's going to be a good one. ***************************************** A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way. -- Mark Twain From lupa at kos.net Sat Jan 10 15:22:14 2009 From: lupa at kos.net (Molly Wolf) Date: Sat, 10 Jan 2009 10:22:14 -0500 Subject: [SB] Sabbath Blessing Message-ID: <20090110152228.78B23CE1FD@barracuda.rutabaga.org> Driving Eastward It's a little after 4 PM on a clear January day and I am driving home from the city. Which means that I am driving east at that very special time of day when the sun is just above the horizon. This time of year, I plan my westward journeys so that I am *not* driving west at 4 PM. I don't happen to possess sunglasses. At 4-ish in the afternoon, if I'm heading west, the sun plants itself directly between sun visor and dashboard, enormously inflated by the atmosphere and painfully brilliant. The only way I can see to drive is to hold up one hand to protect my eyes, a somewhat problematic way of operating a standard transmission. Even walking westward is a problem. Driving eastward is a different matter. Sure, the sun is blazing in my rear view mirror, but that's manageable. I can still check the side mirrors, less bad. What I notice today, for a change, is what this sunlight is doing to the landscape. We are now in High Winter, that brutal brilliant season of cold and real snow, of which we've had a fair bit. There's a beauty to this season, if you're willing to get past the cold and look at it, especially if you get out of town and look at the countryside, which is full of quietness and mystery. There is, at dusk, always the moment when everything turns an entrancing electric blue, something that never fails to astonish me. It's also a time of monochrome. Under a brilliant blue sky, we range from perfectly flat-white fields to the black of asphalt, the steel-grey of water, the quiet grey-browns of denuded woodland. Even the evergreen spruce and pine look chastened. But not in *this* light. As I drive east with the sun at my back, the woods are quietly glowing; the light gilds them. It's as though they've been brought to a sort of life, not the green life of summer, but a light-life in the midst of frozen quiet. There's a shimmer off the snow, too, a reflection of gold, and there's brilliance on the whitecaps on the river. I think to myself: I don't think I could, as I now am, face straight into God; it would be like trying to drive westward at this time of day. It would be more than I could bear. I've come to believe, with C.S. Lewis, that after death we need a time of strengthening and preparation before we can come face to face with our Creator. My sister speaks of her belief in a cool quiet "time out" place, where we sinners can sit for however long it takes, and mend, and make ourselves ready. I like that idea. I *know* I'm going to need something along those lines. I know of others who may refuse that quiet grace, because it would convict them of their own need for forgiveness and they aren't going to go there. But that's between them and God. Not my affair. But I also think: While I can't face God's very self any more than I can cope with the setting sun, I can look over the landscape and see how God's love glows indirectly back in ways my human sight can absorb. Oh, sure, I can look for the mess and the muddle; I can focus on Gaza and the Sudan, Iraq and Afghanistan, and all the horrors that we inflict upon another, as we turn away from the light towards our own willful destructiveness -- everything we do to ourselves and each other out of fear or pride, greed or hatred, or sheer garden-variety stupidity. Everything we do in the key of "me," we set between ourselves and God and between God's love and other human beings. I can look at that, if I choose. And I can still look at this golden light on snow and see that whatever we do, God's love is unshakably *steady*. Whether or not we want it, it is simply there. This briefly illumined landscape would still be beautiful with or without my witness. The brevity of the moment is only because I'm human; it exists eternally in God's steadfastness. I can also see that maybe our job -- even if we can't face God one-on-one -- is to receive this warmth and and transmit it to others as best we can, however imperfect and screwed-up a job we make of it. And we must do so unconditionally. I think of the glow of unconditional love I've received from others in this last while, and what healing power it has had in my life. I've been as aware of it, and as grateful for it, as I am aware and grateful for this light, which reminds me of God's steady love. This light will go, and very quickly; this is only a momentary glow, although it's a glow I can now look for whenever I drive east at this time of day, in high winter, out in this quiet landscape. It will be there again. Maybe, if I'm willing to give it attention, when I look for this light, I'll feel extra warmth on the back of my neck. ***************************************** A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way. -- Mark Twain From lupa at kos.net Sat Jan 17 15:19:00 2009 From: lupa at kos.net (Molly Wolf) Date: Sat, 17 Jan 2009 10:19:00 -0500 Subject: [SB] Sabbath Blessing Message-ID: <20090117151913.18D15E701B@barracuda.rutabaga.org> The Frying Pan Whenever I use my 12-inch stainless steel heavy-bottomed frying pan to saute something over a gas flame, the pan ends up with a deposit of burned-on cooking oil around the sides, a ring of dark brown freckles. While housekeeping is not my favourite occupation, I do like to keep my stainless steel cookware bright -- just one of those things. So when it comes time to wash up, I get out the scrubbing stuff and dampen a dishrag and put some elbow grease into taking those freckles off. I made a mistake, a year or so ago: I had a self-cleaning gas oven that needed to blast out its inner gunk, and this frying pan had a serious case of the cooking-oil freckles, so I thought I'd kill two birds with one stone. I put the pan in the oven and set the oven for self-clean and went to bed. Next morning, when all had cooled down, I took the cleaned-off pan out of the blasted-out oven and remembered what I should have remembered before I'd taken the lazy way out: intense heat discolours stainless steel. My lovely silvery frying pan, best beloved among cookware, was now a mass of bronze and blueish blotches, like bruises. And no, these weren't going to go away, scrub as hard as I might. I felt almost (but not quite) the way I'd felt when I hit an unavoidable squirrel in the road: how could I have *done* this? It wasn't a matter of wrong-doing, only of stupidity, but the fact was that I'd ruined something that was, in its own way, beautiful. A frying pan can hardly suffer as a squirrel can, but still, it was destruction of a sort. And I had the standard response one has to having caused stupid destruction: I wanted to get rid of the evidence. No big; I could go into the city and find myself a handsome brand-new bright-silver stainless steel frying pan, with the same good heavy base that my old pan had. I could give the old pan to the Goodwill -- they never get decent cooking equipment, and newly ugly as this one was, it was still a good frying pan. It would give someone else years of service. The fact that it had been beautiful and was now marred wouldn't affect someone else the way it affected me. I looked at the frying pan. Of course it couldn't look back at me. It's only a frying pan, after all. And then I thought of what it's like to be marred and to be discarded for being marred, especially when it's the result of someone else's dumb choices. I thought about faces. I thought specifically about a woman I know who panhandles in downtown Kingston. She's ten years younger than I am and looks ten years older. She is unsuccessfully blonde and is missing a fair number of teeth. She is clearly terribly marred, likely as the result of her own bad choices -- but so often our bad choices flow from the damage done to us by others' bad choices, and I suspect that's where she probably is. It was never her intention to be so badly damaged; it never is. It was probably not her folks' intention, either. So often, in raising children, we simply don't know what we're doing, and we don't think, and we fail to be committed to what we're doing. We don't take parenting seriously enough -- or we take it far too seriously in wrong directions. Or we pass down to them the problems with which we struggle. Then the children look for love in the wrong places, and then that damage gets compounded -- and it all shows on the skin, in the hair, in the posture, in the weight, but above all, in the eyes. This woman is, in a way, very much like my frying pan: showing damage and therefore discarded by a society that only values the unmarred. As there is a wide and growing gap between the rich and poor, so there is a wide and growing gap between the polished-perfect people in the ads and those whose outer beauty, if they ever had it, has been destroyed by suffering. The more we treasure the perfect, the more we discard the marred. The more we concentrate on successful surfaces, the less we look for what beauty lies inside. I thought of the way I feel when I see my own marred self in photographs. I thought of the resurrected Jesus, who still bore his scars. Then I got out the scrubbing stuff and the damp dishrag and the elbow grease. No, my frying pan will never be its former silvery self. But it's still a good frying pan, and dammit, I owe it something. ***************************************** A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way. -- Mark Twain From lupa at kos.net Sat Jan 24 16:04:27 2009 From: lupa at kos.net (Molly Wolf) Date: Sat, 24 Jan 2009 11:04:27 -0500 Subject: [SB] Sabbath Blessing Message-ID: <20090124160600.A36C110017F@barracuda.rutabaga.org> Slippers I forget where I read it, but it's one of those curiously indelible bits of stray info that permanently adhere to the geeky mind: the slippers in the original Cinderella story weren't glass but fur. In medieval times, the fur of a variegated squirrel was used to line mantles and gave rise to a particular heraldic pattern. The fur and pattern were both called "vair". The French word for glass is "verre". From "vair" to "verre" is a short step, and so Cendrillon's footware morphed from a warm, silky, quite special, variegated heraldic fur slipper into something delicate, rare, and rigid, sized only for the exactly right foot. It probably had a four-inch spike heel, too. In the glass-slipper version, when each ugly stepsister's toes weren't the right shape for the shoe, she cut off bits and pieces in order to force her foot to fit. This always mildly horrified me, although not as much as the rest of the original story (which, like many "nice" fairy tales, was originally gory and vindictive). So what's this got to do with Godstuff? It's a bit roundabout, but bear with me. I got into a discussion a while ago with a Christian whose faith in Scripture and traditional theology is exceedingly strong and admirable. We were getting on with the problem of evil. My friend believes firmly that all suffering goes back to humankind's turning away from God and trying to put humankind in God's place. This is a position I agree with on most levels. You can't live in this world and *not* see the power of sin; it's boldly out there. Toxicity floods our societies and our relationships, and too often Creation itself, where we have abused it. But is Creation itself swamped by sin? My friend thinks so. I can't quite go there. The problem is that I have a (thoroughly outdated) degree in biology, and I follow the sciences with interest. When someone gets cancer, I see genes switching on that should be switched off or vice versa. The events causing cancer are complicated and not fully understood, and I don't know them in any detail; but my understanding is that cancer is a natural process gone very wrong, and that the factors involved are complex. Cancer is tragic, no doubt about that; it can be redeemed, I believe; but is it the product of sin, particular or generalized? I don't know. My friend and I got into a discussion of the great tsunami of 2004, the one that killed hundreds of thousands in southeast Asia. Was this, I asked, the product of sin and death? My friend said firmly that it was -- that in an unfallen world, death would have no dominion. I have problems with that. I have problems because I do believe that science has provided us with a set of data that can, on the whole, be relied upon, and the data strongly suggest that Creation simply *is*, neither wicked nor ethical, but simply *there* in all its beauty and muddle and complexity. The moral interpretation we slap onto it is just that -- our interpretation. The spider eating the fly is neither guilty nor innocent, just hungry, and the fly's suffering (hopefully brief) is simply a condition of life. Those who wrote Scripture (and my friend does accept that Scripture was written by people, divinely inspired) had no notion of tectonic plates; how could they? Neither did the great theologians over the ages. A volcanic explosion was an act of God, pure, plain, and simple, and likely God's punishment for sin. These wise and holy people explained nature as best they could from a moral and spiritual point of view, but they couldn't explain what they didn't know: that bubonic plague is caused by bacteria; that rabies is viral; that malaria involves parasites transmitted by mosquitos; that earthquakes and volcanoes and tsunamis result from the blundering about of chunks of the Earth's crust. And then there's astronomy... Which does *not* make our forebears stupid or naive (the opposite error). In many, many ways, our ancestors had insights and observations of the most profound emotional and spiritual wisdom. They built magnificent structures, physical and intellectual, with the tools and materials they had and with sheer genius. They had skills that we can no longer aspire to. We've gained in some areas of knowledge and understanding; we've lost in others. Third-world weavers, sitting at "crude" hand looms, can still produce webs of a complexity that no Westerner can begin to emulate. I look at the brush strokes in a piece of really good 17th-century painting and realize that those techniques have been lost to us. The problem arises when one knowledge-set simply rejects the other. Dogmatic fundamentalists on both sides insist that they, and only they, have any real hold on Truth. My friend, considering the tsunami, says that sin and death *have* to have caused the ocean bottom earthquake. But, I countered, tectonic plates are far, far older than humankind; they've been clanging into each other long before anything crawled out of the sea, much less stood on two feet and raised a fist to God. And tectonic plates are essentially innocent. This world is indeed a fallen and hurting place, but not because of them. Tectonic plates are just the way this world is built, and presumably our Creator wanted it that way. My friend simply would not go there. If tectonic plates don't fit into Genesis, then they're off his theological radar. Back to those slippers: In a theology of glass slippers, when other information doesn't fit into the belief system, it has to be sliced off and discarded like the stepsisters' toes and heels. That is where Scriptural fundamentalism inevitably leads us. In that case, everything that geology and biology and cosmology and the other natural sciences have uncovered is true if, and only if, it fits the scriptural slipper. Otherwise, lop it off. Ditto for the glass slipper of fundamentalist science: if it can't be hypothesized and subjected to the scientific method, it is non-existent. (Very few scientists actually take this position, by the way; but the ones who do get published, because scandal sells.) The problem, as Huston Smith wisely observed, is that "absence of proof is not proof of absence." But what if the slipper is fur? Fur has some stretch to it; it's shaped, it's defined, but it has play. In a theology of fur, the fundamental foot-shape is still there; there's a definite heel and toe and instep and sole. But in a fur slipper, living toes could wriggle and stretch, fur surrounding and warming foot, foot informing and fitting into fur. Fur is intimate. Glass is not. I can conceive of a theology in which scripture and science are not set at irrevocable odds with each other, but where they play with each other -- playing perhaps like lion cubs, a serious, intent, demanding, and quite rough play, but also perhaps playing in sheer fun. The two need to answer to each other as viol answers violin; they're both essential to the music of truth. What kind of Creator would set tectonic plates lumbering into one another? What's the result of evil (the power of sin and death) and what's simply Creation doing its Creative thing, with humankind along for the sometimes dangerous ride? Were we once pure and sinless and immortal, and we fell? Or are we slowly blooming, with all kinds of retrogressions and deep errors, into what we are divinely called to become? In my friend's narrative of Creation, humankind's relationship with God is absolutely central. In a science-based narrative of Creation, humankind is a very late arrival and an opportunistic and aggressive species. And both versions are true. We have no evidence of pre-lapsarian immortality, other than belief; we do, on the other hand, know that death is a natural part of *all* natural life. Even when clone-forms like stands of bamboo appear immortal, every individual within the clone must die. Is this our fault for our rebellion against God? Or is it simply the natural order of things? Maybe there's a different sort of death we're talking about. But in that case, what sort? What on earth do we do with what Creation says to us, when we're willing to shut up and listen? Perhaps original sin is just as much our arrogance against Creation as it is our arrogance against the Creator. The two are not mutually exclusive, after all. In calling Creation fallen because it sometimes makes us suffer, haven't we set ourselves at the centre of the universe? When we say that *our* failure taints even tectonic plates, isn't that a whopping piece of human narcissism? Aren't we dragging Creation down to our own level? And is that what our Creator wants of us? Maybe that's where the real sin lies. Whatever Creation is, it has God's thumbprints all over it. Who are we to pass our limited, self-absorbed judgment on what God has declared to be good? Back to those slippers again. The glass slipper is authoritative: it says what goes and what doesn't, because it *knows* the way the foot should be. It expects the foot to adapt or find some other footwear. The fur slipper is experiential; it says, let's work this out together; there's truth both sides. And yes, maybe that gentler approach can be too loosey-goosey and over-personal. Nothing human works perfectly, after all. The odd thing is that I can see virtues on both sides. I make as much progress in fighting with rigidity as I do in exploring in gentleness and openness. I have to know what it is I question, and that means accepting that what I question is important enough to argue with. I cannot reject either side, Scripture or science. I can only try to hold them together and work out my own reconciliation. But it's in the struggle that I do my best God-thinking. My own personal slippers are soft, trodden-down sheepskin. It's still January, and my floors are cold. Time to go dig them out and put them on. ***************************************** A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way. -- Mark Twain -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://justus.anglican.org/pipermail/sabbath-blessings/attachments/20090124/0385a730/attachment.html